German version

The Eurocracy's contempt for the nation-states it governs is growing ever more
flagrant.

By
Janet Daley, 11.05.11

It isn’t often that you are aware of the world order changing before your
eyes. Last week, the European Union effectively undermined the
democratically elected government of one member state and put another one on
notice. The snuffing out of that little gasp of desperate rebellion in
Greece, and the political chaos that followed, caused a moment’s
embarrassment when the EU leadership had to face down questions about its
commitment to democracy. But that blew over quickly enough: there could be
no question of disregarding the will of the people, Angela Merkel insisted.
The electorate of a country had every right to express its opinion in a
referendum if its government saw fit to hold one.

She was seconded in this acceptance of sacred democratic principle by Nicolas
Sarkozy, although he was rather less successful in concealing his disgust at
the insolence of one wretched little country’s defiance of the great
European oligarchy. But the tact and facile diplomacy ran out fast. Pretty
soon, the European Union was setting the terms for this impertinent
plebiscite: it could not – repeat not – simply be on the bail-out deal. The
question would have to be whether Greece was to remain in the euro at all.
This pronouncement was then almost immediately ramped up (with questionable
legality) to mean that departure from the euro would necessitate leaving the
EU itself. And it was this nuclear threat that almost certainly saved George
Papandreou.

So the Eurocracy that had been saying only days earlier that Greece could
never, ever leave the euro, whatever its people or government said they
wanted, was now threatening to expel Greece not just from the single
currency, but from the European Union. And Italy got the message soon
enough: the EU is out of patience with the bad boys. No more messing around.
So having once been adamant that no external agency would be allowed to
oversee its country’s accounts, the Italian government announced that it was
ready to open its books to the EU and the IMF. Its fiscal policy will no
longer be a matter for purely national decision-making, and will therefore
be beyond the reach of its electorate.

So which is it? Is membership of the euro (or the EU) like being a Soviet
satellite: a prisoner nation held in bondage to a superior power? Or is it
more akin to being the client state of an imperial benefactor, which can
call the shots on internal policy and replace elected governments with
puppet regimes when it sees fit?

In the midst of all the earnest blather about respecting the democratic will
of countries, there were some revealing slips. (Or were they slips? The
proclamations were getting cruder and more unguarded by the minute.) At one
point, Mr Sarkozy said: “In no way would I want to give the impression that
I’m interfering in [the Greeks’] domestic politics, [but] Europe is our
homeland…” Is it? Has Europe – the EU – become the nation state to which all
citizens of its member countries are expected to give their allegiance?

Maybe so, and perhaps this is something that a good many of those citizens who
regard themselves as enlightened would accept: the Italians who fear the
clowns and neo-fascists among their politicians, the French who fear
American hegemony, and the Germans who fear the impulses of their
countrymen. But if this is the future – if the Eurocracy is determined to
dictate the political make-up of all the governments within its membership,
declaring out of order or defining out of existence any opposition to what
Jose Manuel Barroso calls “consensus and collective spirit” – then how is
Mrs Merkel’s precious “will of the people” to assert itself?

If this is now one “homeland”, as Mr Sarkozy would have it, who are its
enfranchised electors? Where does the power lie to overthrow or replace its
rulers? What are the mechanisms for recalling the governing elite?
Apparently, they will have to be foregone in the present emergency. (But
where is the promise that they will ever return?) The future of the euro –
that grand ideological folly which was supposed to remove any possibility of
national self-aggrandisement – must take precedence now. All those quaint
assumptions about the legitimacy of government coming from the consent of
the governed must be cashed in for the “economic stability” that the rules
of euro membership will provide.

What those rules actually provide, of course, is a guidebook for all European
peoples in how to behave like Germans – even if their temperaments and
historical experience are quite unsuited to this. It begins to look as if
those countries least able to do plausible impersonations of German
orderliness and productivity will be knuckling under none the less, for fear
of being cast out of the European club – or, less sentimentally, being cut
off from the feeding tube of support which is all that can sustain them in
their present fix.

The governments that might be displaced are unlikely to be missed –
incompetent and corrupt as they may have been. But what will go with them is
more important: the possibility of electing or rejecting whatever political
leadership you, or a majority of your countrymen, choose.

The Greeks have been given a brutal lesson and the Italians a firm warning.
Welcome to post-democratic Europe. What an irony that the rise of freedom in
the Middle East – the Arab Spring – should coincide with the acceptance of
its decline in the West. (The European Autumn?) Is this going to be the big
story of the 21st century? Not just the West’s loss of economic dominance to
the East, but the wilful dismantling of its political inheritance?

Thus far it has been politicians bending the knee. Whatever their governing
classes decide, will Europe’s populations be prepared to sacrifice electoral
self-determination? In peacetime, the voluntary renunciation of democratic
rights is, so far as I know, unprecedented. But modern standards of
prosperity have become so addictive – and Europeans so dependent on “social
protection” (another favourite Barroso phrase) – that even the temporary
loss of them may be too great a price to pay for an abstraction like
political liberty.

Benjamin Franklin once said: “People willing to trade their freedom for
temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.” In the present case,
you have to insert the word “economic” in front of security, but the lesson
still holds. If you lose the right to choose who governs you – or allow some
greater authority to determine the limits of their power – what recourse do
you have when the promises are broken and “security” becomes a prison?

Sophie: I raise an interesting point here. The death penalty is against the law in all EU Member States and the moratorium preceded the EU; however, the Apparatchiks knowing that the next few years in Europe will be some of the worst of times...with a depression, shortages of foodstuffs and medications, etc. In Greece, there has been and explosion in new cases of patients with AIDS, malaria, Hepatitis. The numbers are shocking. A 1250% increase in HIV-infections in 1 year. Sadly, because of the austerity measures that have to be kept if the country -- for some reason that I can't understand -- wants to stay in the euro.

Getting back to the death penalty: Interestingly,
in the Soviet-like EU with its 27 unelected, unaccountable apparatchiks, the
death penalty was reintroduced in a footnote to the Treaty of Lisboa, upon
neither the whole nor part of which the overwhelming majority of Europeans were
allowed to vote. In its “explanations” and “negative definitions”
accompanying the fundamental rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European
Union allows a reintroduction of the death penalty in case of war or imminent
war, but also the killing of humans to suppress insurgency or riot.

I am not a proponent of the death penalty, as it is cost ineffective and most
death row inmates die of natural causes after millions have been spent on their
cases; however, if there is going to be a death penalty, this is a case for
it.

Strangely, the European Soviet can kill you if you riot against or attempt to
overthrow it regardless of how justified either are, but kill nearly 77 people like Anders Breivirs Behring? "Oh,no. We're Europe. We are so civilised.
We can't kill mass murderers. We have evolved...unlike those Neanderthal
Americans. Would you care for some Pouilly-Fuissé et Brie de Meaux?"